NHK Nets World Series in New Truck

Japanese broadcaster NHK has put a new OB truck on the road designed specifically to capture major U.S. sports events for its viewers back home that is fitted with Lawo technology. One of the truck’s first gigs was tackling the World Series, where the Kansas City Royals took the title this past weekend.

Kazutaka Noda, Broadcast Mixing Engineer and Technical CoordinatorNew York, NY (November 3, 3015)—Japanese broadcaster NHK has put a new OB truck on the road designed specifically to capture major U.S. sports events for its viewers back home that is fitted with Lawo technology. One of the truck’s first gigs was tackling the World Series, where the Kansas City Royals took the title this past weekend.

The new mobile unit is the first RAVENNA-based truck in the U.S., utilizing Lawo’s newest dual-fader mc?56XT mixing console. The console provides a 64-fader surface in an audio booth with 84 inches of linear space. It accommodates 288 DSP paths with 8,192 x 8,192 audio routing capability and three DALLIS I/O stageboxes in a redundant configuration. The RAVENNA technology fully supports AES67.

In its current configuration, the truck supports conventional stereo and surround mix capabilities and serves as a test bed for deployment of 22.2 surround mixing and monitoring. In a long-standing cooperative effort between NHK and Lawo, the two companies have been working together to develop the tools and practical applications needed to create an immersive audio experience with 3D surround audio and are committed to developing further technical innovations.

The on-board operations and engineering team elected to debut the new truck in a live broadcast of a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees on September 28 in New York. More recently, the unit has been deployed for coverage of this year’s major league baseball playoffs including the league championships and World Series.